Today we’d like to introduce you to Jesse Ward.
Jesse, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in a musical family. My dad is a guitarist and singer/songwriter who worked as a band director, and there were other guitar players and singers in my extended family as well. My mom wasn’t a musician, but she has always been incredibly supportive, and I definitely wouldn’t be who I am or doing what I’m doing without her help.
I also grew up in the Church of Christ, where traditionally there are no instruments used in worship, so a lot of my earliest musical experiences were actually with four-part vocal harmony. Everyone in my family sang, and I remember if a song had four verses, I would sometimes try to sing a different harmony part on every verse. Outside of regular worship, my dad and I did get opportunities to play guitar together, and I also grew up playing music with my brothers, cousins, and other family members.
My first instrument was violin in elementary school, but that didn’t stick. I started trumpet in middle school, around the time my dad became my band teacher, and I ended up learning to play most of the instruments in the band room. Then I started guitar at 13, and that quickly became my main obsession. Heavy metal initially made me want to see how far I could push myself technically and musically.
Around the same time, I started digging through jazz records and CDs my dad had around the band room and I became obsessed with jazz. It sounded almost impossible to me, and I think there has always been something compelling to me about trying to do something that seems impossible.
I spent my last two years of high school at HSPVA in Houston. I was pretty intimidated when I arrived and immediately realized how much I had to learn. Being in that environment helped me develop a solid foundation for jazz playing.
I eventually went to New England Conservatory, largely because Ben Monder was teaching there. I studied with Ben my first year and then primarily with Joe Morris. NEC completely expanded my idea of what music could be.
Since NEC I’ve lived and played in Houston, California and Atlanta, moving between straight-ahead jazz, composition and free improvisation and learning from a lot of different musicians along the way. Eventually I returned to Houston and gradually reconnected with both the jazz and experimental music communities.
These days I play in Aurum Son, Ignite The Body, El Mantis and Anton Syndrome, along with jazz gigs and occasional musical theater work. I still get to play and perform with my family as well. I’m still interested in a lot of different things—jazz, improvisation, experimental music, philosophy, spirituality—and more and more I’m just trying to let all of those interests feed into the way I play and create.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Some of the biggest struggles for me have been financial and mental health related, but I’ve also spent a lot of my life wrestling with the relationship between creativity, religion and personal freedom. In different ways, I think all of those struggles have involved questions about limitations and how to move beyond them.
I came out of music school with a large amount of student loan debt. College had been this incredible, life-changing experience where my understanding of music, art and the world expanded enormously, so it was pretty devastating afterward to confront the financial reality of that experience. For most of my adult life I’ve had to balance music with some kind of non-musical work, and financial pressure can make it difficult to invest in projects, equipment, recordings or just continuing to develop as an artist.
Mental health has also been an ongoing struggle. I’m naturally pretty introverted, and when I’m struggling mentally it becomes even easier to withdraw and harder to put myself and my work out into the world.
Another struggle has been figuring out my relationship with religion. I grew up in a very religious environment, and in college I started to feel like religion and the creative path were pulling me in opposite directions. Creativity, to me, is fundamentally about exploration. It’s about going into unknown territory, questioning assumptions and seeing what might exist beyond the limitations you’ve inherited. At that point in my life, I experienced religion as something that placed boundaries around that exploration, so I felt a need to reject it.
Interestingly, after college the pendulum swung pretty far in the other direction. I embraced religion again for a period of time and put a lot of my creative life on the back burner. I’m still figuring out what relationship, if any, those two things can have for me. At this point, though, I know that I want to follow creativity wherever it leads. If religion or spirituality can be part of that exploration, I’m open to it, but I don’t feel a need to limit that exploration in order to fit within a particular framework.
In some ways, music has been what allows me to navigate all of this. I have a lot of ideas and interests that can be pretty weird or out there, and without a creative outlet I think I would probably hide much more of myself from other people. Music gives me a language for things I don’t always know how to communicate directly. I can bring all of that into what I play, and people can experience it without necessarily needing to understand everything behind it.
There have been some genuinely dark periods in my life, and these struggles aren’t all neatly resolved. But music has continually given me a way to find and express something beyond that darkness. I sometimes think of music as the light that helps me navigate the darkness. Without that light, I think I’d be much more lost in it.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I think what I bring to music is a combination of experience, versatility, creativity and a high level of musicianship. I’ve spent a lot of years developing as a guitarist, but I’ve also deliberately put myself in a pretty wide range of musical situations. I might be playing straight-ahead jazz one night, free improvisation or experimental music another night, playing with one of my bands, or doing something completely different like musical theater.
One thing I’m proud of is being able to bring the same level of commitment and creativity to all of those situations. I also try not to play in a way that makes me the center of attention all the time. One of the things I love most about playing with other musicians is listening and finding ways to contribute something that elevates the whole group. I want to bring something distinctive to the music while also creating space for everyone else to bring what they do. I think the people I work with also know that I’m going to come prepared, take the music seriously and hopefully be pretty easy to work with.
I’m proud in some way of pretty much every recording I’ve released or been a part of, because they all represent different periods and different sides of me as a musician. A few recordings in particular give a pretty good picture of that range.
My most recent release with Aurum Son, “The Western Lands,” is an original composition of mine, and we released a really cool music video alongside it. Campfire Songs, which I recorded with Aaron Kruziki on alto flute, is an entirely acoustic project where I play acoustic guitar throughout. Good Juju, recorded with Hugh Von Kleist, is straight-ahead jazz and probably gives people one of the clearest pictures of that side of my playing. Then there’s 767676, which is a completely solo, completely improvised album and represents a very different part of what I do.
I think that range is probably what sets me apart most. I don’t really want to choose between being a jazz guitarist, an improviser, an experimental musician or a creative collaborator. I’m interested in bringing everything I’ve learned from those different worlds into whatever musical situation I’m in. The goal for me is to play at a high level, stay creative and curious, listen deeply, and make whatever is happening around me better.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @jessewardmusic
- Youtube: @AurumSon
